In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Alejandro Puyana’s novel Freedom Is a Feast is an evocative and immersive debut.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Puyana debuts with a gripping story of a family shaped by Venezuela’s tumultuous history during the Cold War and early 21st century . . . wrenching . . . Puyana’s beautifully crafted narrative explores the complexity of his characters’ choices and loyalties. This novel is impossible to put down.”
In his own words, here is Alejandro Puyana’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Freedom Is a Feast:
I’m a romantic—always have been. But especially when I was a teenager. I went from crush to crush, and because I was shy, instead of trying to make these romantic dreams a reality, I preferred to dwell in the imagination. I would listen to music about long-lost love, about love that could not be, about the world keeping people apart.
Growing up in Caracas, the Caribbean an hour away, that type of romanticism bloomed in every corner, hung from trees like mangos. Genre didn’t matter to me, if it was about love, and especially if it was about unrequited love, I was sucked in. Later I learned these were called “torch songs” and was drawn even further into this category of music. The image of keeping the flame alive for someone that no longer cares for you plucks at a string inside me that, even as I write this, tickles me in a very particular way—a mix of melancholy and giddiness.
It was during one of these high school crushes that I discovered Cuban trova, the music genre that rose out of the success of the Cuban revolution, mixing Latin American folk music with strong anti-imperialist, anti-US messaging. My crush at the time would interrupt our history lectures to opine on the current injustices plaguing the continent, to the ridicule of some of my friends, while I secretly swooned. We were friends, and I remember an afternoon we spent studying together when she gave me a CD with Silvio Rodríguez songs. They were fiery, combative, proselytizing in their own way, and also deeply and irrevocably romantic.
In my novel, Freedom Is a Feast, I let myself fall into that romanticism often. It’s one of the things I loved most about writing the book. Stanislavo, a young intellectual from Caracas in the 60s, moves to the tropical jungles of the Venezuelan coast to fight for the revolution. There he meets Emiliana, a nurse also fighting for the cause. They fall madly in love. But, of course, things don’t work out. They both find a way to fuck it up.
This is Emiliana’s torch playlist. This is the burned CD she puts on when she’s 55 years-old and wants to go swimming in the nostalgia of her youth, when she was the most in love she has ever been. It makes her fall for Stanislavo all over again, and makes her hate him as much as she ever has.
The list also paints a little bit of a panorama of Latin American music in the second half of the 20th century, a mix of folk and traditional songs, protest songs coming out of the new Cuban trova of the 60s, with some examples of salsa brava of the 80s. The music that Emiliana would have been exposed to and gravitated towards.
If you’re curious, my favorite torch song of all time is ABBA’s The Winner Takes it All. But that belongs on another playlist, not Emiliana’s.
Canción para mi América by Soledad Bravo
This folk anthem, sung by the incomparable Soledad Bravo, transports Emiliana to the jungles of Mochima. It turns her young again:
America is screaming
The century turns blue
Plains, rivers and mountains
Give off their own light
The verses don’t want owners
No more orders from masters
The American guitar
Learned to sing by fighting
Canción en Dolor Mayor by Alí Primera
This is the song that reminds Emiliana of her friends that fought and died for the cause, and also, of course, of Stanislavo. In the song, Alí Primera, is willing to sacrifice everything, even his music, to further the cause. It hurts her to think Stanislavo did the same, sacrificing their love for the movement.
If my song is not enough to set your soul on fire
Then you can burn my guitar, as long as the flame grows.
Anhelante by Gualberto Ibarreto
If the first two songs are fighting songs, then this is a surrender. The first torch song on the list, this is Emiliana admitting to herself how much she misses Stanislavo, and that, if he came back, she would take him.
And although you tell me that you don’t love me
You will live sweetly within me
Like the song of restless birds
Like the dew after a grey cloud
And although I might roam in life
Longingly I will wait for you
The Doy Una Canción by Silvio Rodriguez
The first Trova Cubana song on the list, by its most famous performer Silvio Rodríguez, could also be considered a torch song. But this one is defiant, comes from a place of agency rather than surrender. The object of love in this song, which could be a person, or a cause, or a country, is not lost forever. In fact, Silvio is giving them a song that could convince them to come back, not weak and groveling, but out of a place of power.
I give you a song and make a speech
About my right to speak up
I give you a song
With my two hands
The same I use to kill
I give you a song and I say: homeland
But I still speak to you
I give you a song
Like a shot
Like a book, like a word
Like a revolution
Like I give out my love
Yolanda by Pablo Milanés
This is Emiliana’s favorite song (and one of mine, too). After the battle of “Te Doy Una Canción,” this song makes her heart soften. It also makes her cry. This is what she wishes their love had been, a place of refuge instead of disappointment.
When I saw you, I knew that it was true
This fear of finding myself bare
You undress me with seven reasons
Open my chest every time you fill me
With love
With love
Eternally with love
No Soy de Aquí Ni Soy de Allá by Facundo Cabral
Emiliana gains some of her strength with this song. It reminds her of her own independence and of her own power. This song is pure poetry, and a bit of a fuck you to Stanislavo. It’s her way of saying, I have my own life and I don’t need you.
I put the sun on my shoulder
And the world is yellow
And if it rains, I get wet
And I don’t get mad because I don’t shrink
A lettuce leaf is enough to give me shade
And what does it matter if he doesn’t name me?
Aquellas Pequeñas Cosas by Joan Manuel Serrat
This song is all about how memories can sometimes come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, you’re flooded with unexpected feeling. For Emiliana it gets her deep in her nostalgia. She doesn’t only miss Stanislavo when she hears it, she misses Tomasa and Tucán and the rest of the revolutionary boys, and she misses the life they could have had, had things turned out different.
It’s those little things
That a rosier time left for us
In a corner, or in a piece of paper
Or in a box
Like a thief
They wait for you behind a door
They have you at their mercy
Like dead leaves
Paula C by Rubén Blades
Memories have led Emiliana back to the missing. The unfairness of Stanislavo having left. She relates to the sad crooning of Rubén Blades, and is mesmerized by the rhythm of this classic salsa anthem.
Paula C, in the silence she left without responding
And that night I understood that never again
I would forget her love
La Soledad by Ismael Rivera
Latin Americans reading this might relate: there’s nothing better than a sad song you can dance to. There’s a special thing that is born out of the dissonance of such a joyous activity merged with Maelo’s (to many, salsa’s GOAT) praise to loneliness. And that is how Emiliana feels about this song. If you’re going to be sad, you might as well shake your hips to the rhythm.
Hey, Mamita, your silence haunts me
And your heart I no longer feel
Mamita, what is it
I can’t survive all this silence
Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra
Emiliana ends her playlist with nostalgic optimism. Realizing that she’s lived a full, beautiful life. Violeta Parra’s ground shaking poem/song is a reminder to all of us that no matter what happens, life is a gift.
Thanks to life that has given me so much
It gave me my ears that in their wideness
Records day and night crickets and canaries
Hammers, turbines, barks, rainstorms
And the tender voice of my lover
Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story “Hands of Dirty Children” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories. He lives with his wife (the writer Brittani Sonnenberg) and daughter in Austin, Texas.